Is NASA Addicted to Mars? New Mission Planned for 2016

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Is NASA Addicted to Mars? New Mission Planned for 2016

Hot on the heels of Curiosity's successful landing, NASA has decided to send another mission to Mars. The project, called InSight, involves drilling 16 feet into the crust of Mars. The mission, set to launch in 2016, will provide detailed information about the planet's core, in particular determining whether it is liquid or solid.

"This is the first time we’re looking at the interior of Mars," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator in the science mission directorate, during a press conference on Aug. 20. "There are many science questions we’re dying to learn the answer to."

Though NASA currently has several probes on Mars – including the remaining MER rover, Opportunity, the new and popular Curiosity rover, and the high-flying Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey spacecrafts – future Mars exploration has been looking pretty sparse. Other than the MAVEN orbiter, set to launch next year, NASA had no further Mars missions on its plate. The U.S. agency had formerly partnered with ESA to send probes to the Red Planet in 2016 and 2018, but those plans were terminated when NASA's last budget made deep cuts to planetary science. The new InSight mission puts Mars back on NASA's radar.

Unlike Curiosity and its complex sky-crane maneuver, InSight will use Phoenix lander-type technology to reach the Martian surface. It will carry a robotic arm and two black-and-white cameras as well as instruments to measure Martian seismic activity and the planet's rotation axis. A small drill-like instrument will vibrate to wiggle down into the soil and penetrate a few feet into the crust to make temperature measurements.

Though a rocky planet like Earth, Mars is much smaller than our home world and has evolved quite differently. Unlike Earth, the Red Planet has no crustal plates and no global magnetic field. It remains an open question whether Marsquakes shake its surface and how much.

InSight is part of NASA's Discovery-class program, which aims to produce top notch science on the cheap. The mission is capped at $425 million, a steal compared to the recent flagship $2.5-billion Curiosity rover. Insight was competing for selection as the next Discovery mission against two others, the Comet Hopper, which would have explored the body of a comet, and the Titan Mare Explorer, which planned to land a small boat-like probe on a methane lake on Saturn's moon Titan.